Around $2 billion was spent each year in the United States on the planning and design of services, but only $70 million (about 3.5%) of this was spent on “service design.” The other 96.5% of the work was done by people who did not consider themselves service designers. (Adaptive Path)

Shouldn't the design of services be done by service designers

Schumpeter in 1927 said the economic business cycle has four phases: brain activity, adoption curve, routine, and crises.When the cycles lasted 60 years, these phases occurred without people noticing. Now that they last six months, knowing how to work on several “brain activity” phases to create knowledge is fundamental.The need for innovation is driven by<ul><li>an immense shortening of business cycles</li><li>a changing and super-connected (business) world,</li><li>a general ubiquity of technology and information which makes it easier than ever to copy, and</li><li>service dominance.</li></ul>

Economic business cycles used to last 60yrs, now they last 6mth

The offerings made by organizations – the products, physical and digital services 2 we want – are wrapped in much the same way as a children's pass the parcel.The experience of our offering is filtered by customers’ perception of our behavior, expertise, processes, systems, and tools. They only perceive our solutions through the veils of all these layers, usually starting with the outermost.The only way to get to the offering you want is through all those layers – they all contribute to your experience.

Customer experience is like the layers of a pass the parcel 

Service design? Other people might talk about design thinking, service design thinking, new marketing, UX design, holistic UX, CX design, human-centered design, customer experience management, experience design, touchpoint management, lean UX, new service development, new product development, customer journey work, or innovation, to name a few. Others will notice similarities with lean startup and agile development methodologies. We don’t care what you call it – what matters is what you do and how you do it.

What is service design & does it really matter what you call it

Iteration – working in a series of repeating, deepening, explorative loops – is absolutely central to the SD process, so practitioners aim for short cycles at the outset, with early user feedback, early prototyping, and quick-and-dirty experiments. As the process continues, the iteration may slow down but it never goes away, as prototypes iterate into pilots and pilots iterate into implementation.Everyone likes to focus on processes and toolsets because they can see, touch, and use them. But without the service design mindset, people go right back to the same internally focused solutions.

Service design as an iterative process

<ul><li>“Service design helps to innovate (create new) or improve (existing) services to make them more useful, usable, desirable for clients and efficient as well as effective for organizations. It is a new holistic, multidisciplinary, integrative field.”</li><li>“Service design choreographs processes, technologies and interactions within complex systems in order to co-create value for relevant stakeholders.”</li><li>“When you have 2 coffee shops next to each other, selling the same coffee at the same price, service design makes you walk into one and not the other, come back often and tell your friends about it.”</li></ul>

Defining service design

In this book, you'll find 54 hands-on descriptions that help you do the key methods used in service design. These methods include instructions, guidelines, and tips-and-tricks for activities within research, ideation, prototyping, and facilitation. This is the print version of the method companion to the book This Is Service Design Doing (#TiSDD). It includes the same content that you can find free on the book website, tisdd.com, but nicely revisualized and presented in a professional bound format. Caveat: While methods are the building blocks of a service design process, owning a pile of bricks does not make you an architect or even a bricklayer. Success in doing service design certainly requires a mastery of these methods. However, you must also be able to combine them into a process that fits the context and needs of your organization and guide people through this new way of working. This book only contains the building blocks--the methods. It doesn't detail how to assemble them into a cohesive design process or how to plan or manage it. Neither does it describe why people should invest in service design nor explain how to bring service design to life in your organization. For all of this (and more), please read This Is Service Design Doing.

product

Product & Design

In this book, you'll find 54 hands-on descriptions that help you DO the key methods used in service design. These methods include instructions, guidelines, and tips-and-tricks for activities within research, ideation, prototyping, and facilitation. This is the print version of the method companion to the book This Is Service Design Doing (#TiSDD). It includes the same content that you can find free on the book website, tisdd.com, but nicely revisualized and presented in a professional bound format. Caveat: While methods are the building blocks of a service design process, owning a pile of bricks does not make you an architect or even a bricklayer. Success in doing service design certainly requires a mastery of these methods. However, you must also be able to combine them into a process that fits the context and needs of your organization and guide people through this new way of working. This book only contains the building blocks--the methods. It doesn't detail how to assemble them into a cohesive design process or how to plan or manage it. Neither does it describe why people should invest in service design nor explain how to bring service design to life in your organization. For all of this (and more), please read This Is Service Design Doing.